What Should We Think of China?

When I first saw the title of this post by David Frum at The Atlantic, “China Is a Paper Dragon”, I dismissed it out of hand as posturing. When I went back and read it, I continued to think there were elements of posturing in it but I thought I’d pass it along nonetheless. Here’s a sample from it I found interesting:

In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics. Meanwhile, U.S. advantages are persistently underestimated. The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes. Above all, Beckley pleads with readers not to focus on the headline numbers of gross domestic product. China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then—and it will not make China a superpower now, or so Beckley contends.

Beckley is a voracious reader of specialist Chinese military journals and economic reports. And, he argues, many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”

When Chinese forces do train, Beckley argues, the exercises bear little resemblance to the challenges the People’s Liberation Army would face in a great-power conflict:

PLA exercises remain heavily scripted (the red team almost always wins) … Most exercises involve a single service or branch, so troops lack the ability to conduct joint operations, and assessments are often nothing more than “subjective judgments based on visual observation rather than on detailed quantitative data” and are scored “based simply on whether a training program has been implemented rather than on whether the goals of the program have been achieved.”

For my part I have what I believe is a realistic assessment of the threat posed by China. I’m less worried about the military threat posed by China than some but I can’t dismiss any country that devotes as much time, attention, and resources to state-supported industrial espionage as China does. My epiphany on China came when I was studying Chinese, learning to speak as well as read and write the language using the traditional writing system.

But I also think that China has weaknesses as do we. Our biggest weakness remains, as the Soviets knew, that all it takes to corrupt many Americans is money. IMO China’s biggest weakness is the weakness of all oligarchies: subordinates will do practically anything including lie, cheat, and steal to please their superiors. In practice that means that not even the Chinese authorities can trust the statistics emerging from China.